Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Who said: "Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success"

BookBrowse's Favorite Quotes

"Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success" – Dale Carnegie

Dale CarnegieDale Breckenridge Carnegie (1888–1955), born Carnagey, was an American writer and lecturer best remembered for his extremely popular courses on self-improvement, salesmanship, public speaking and interpersonal skills.

Born in Maryville, Missouri, the son of a poor farmer, Carnegie managed to keep up with his education despite getting up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. After college he sold correspondence courses to ranchers, then moved to selling food products. After saving $500 he quit his job in 1911 in the hope of becoming a traveling lecturer, but instead he ended up at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Finding little success as an actor he got the idea of teaching public speaking and persuaded the manager of the YMCA where he was staying in in New York to let him instruct a class in return for 80% of the net proceeds. The Dale Carnegie Course evolved from this modest start.

One of his most canny marketing moves was to change the spelling of his last name from Carnagey to Carnegie - the same spelling used by the well known, but unrelated, industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. In 1916, four years after his first lecture, Dale Carnegie was sufficiently well known that he was able to rent Carnegie Hall in New York, and conduct a lecture to a packed house.

Although not the only book he wrote, he is best remembered as the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). By the time of his death of Hodgkin's disease in 1955, the book had sold more than five million copies in 31 languages, and 450,000 had graduated from the Dale Carnegie Institute.

More Quotes

This quote & biography originally ran in an issue of BookBrowse's membership magazine. Full Membership Features & Benefits.

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Lilac People
    by Milo Todd
    For fans of All the Light We Cannot See, a poignant tale of a trans man’s survival in Nazi Germany and postwar Berlin.
  • Book Jacket
    Lessons in Chemistry
    by Bonnie Garmus
    Praised by Parade and The New York Times Book Review, this debut features a 1960s scientist turned TV cooking star.
  • Book Jacket
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Based on the author’s family story, comes an extraordinary novel about a mother and her daughters’ escape from Taiwan.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Awake in the Floating City
    by Susanna Kwan

    A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.

  • Book Jacket

    Serial Killer Games
    by Kate Posey

    A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).

  • Book Jacket

    The Original Daughter
    by Jemimah Wei

    A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

  • Book Jacket

    Ginseng Roots
    by Craig Thompson

    A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.

Who Said...

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B W M in H M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.